Stanford was founded in 1885 by former California governor and senator Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, as a memorial to their son Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid in Europe a few weeks before his 16th birthday. The Stanfords used their farm lands to establish the university hoping to create a large institution in California.
Stanford enrolls about 6,700 undergraduate and about 8,000 graduate students from the United States and around the world every year. The university is divided into a number of schools such as the Stanford Business School, Stanford Law School, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford School of Engineering.The university is in Silicon Valley, and its alumni have founded companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Silicon Graphics and Google.
History
Stanford was founded by railroad magnate and California Governor Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Stanford. It is named in honor of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died of typhoid just before his 16th birthday. They decided to dedicate a university to their only son, and Leland Stanford told his wife, "The children of California shall be our children."
There exists a popular story that a lady in "faded gingham" and a man in a "homespun threadbare suit" went to visit the president of Harvard about making a donation, were rebuffed, and then founded Stanford. This story is untrue. The historical account is that the Senator and Mrs. Stanford visited Harvard's President Eliot and asked how much it would cost to duplicate Harvard in Palo Alto. Eliot replied that he supposed $15 million would be enough. However, the Stanfords were gracefully rebuffed in securing A.D. White the president of Cornell University as Stanford's founding president. Instead, White recommended David Starr Jordan, White's former student. They eventually settled on David Starr Jordan, president of Indiana University, although they had offered leaders of the Ivy League twice his salary to direct Stanford.
Locals and members of the university community are known to refer to the school as The Farm, a nod to the fact that the university is located on the former site of Leland Stanford's horse farm.
The University's founding grant was written on November 11, 1885, and accepted by the first Board of Trustees on November 14. The cornerstone was laid on May 14, 1887, and the University officially opened on October 1, 1891, to 559 students and 15 faculty members, seven of whom hailed from Cornell University. At the opening of the school there was no tuition for students, a program which lasted into the 1930s . Among the first class of students was a young future president Herbert Hoover, who would claim to be first student ever at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory.
On October 1, 1891, Stanford University opened its doors after six years of planning and building. In the early morning hours, construction workers were still preparing the Inner Quadrangle for the opening ceremonies. The great arch at the western end had been backed with panels of red and white cloth to form an alcove where the dignitaries would sit. Behind the stage was a life-size portrait of Leland Stanford, Jr., in whose memory the university was founded. About 2,000 seats, many of them sturdy classroom chairs, were set up in the 3-acre (12,000 m2) Quad, and they soon proved insufficient for the growing crowd. By midmorning, people were streaming across the brown fields on foot. Riding horses, carriages and farm wagons were hitched to every fence and at half past ten the special train from San Francisco came puffing almost to the university buildings on the temporary spur that had been used during construction.
The school was established as a coeducational institution. However, between approximately 1899 and 1933, there was a policy in place limiting female enrollment to 500 students and maintaining a ratio of three males for every one female student. This was based on a concern of Jane Stanford, who worried that without such a cap, the school could become an all-female institution, which she did not feel would be an appropriate memorial for her son. By the late 1960s the "ratio" was about 2:1 for undergraduates and much more skewed at the graduate level, except in the humanities. As of 2005, undergraduate enrollment is split nearly evenly between the sexes, but male enrollees outnumber female enrollees about 2:1 at the graduate level.
After Senator Stanford died in 1893, Jane Stanford continued to supervise the university's development for the next 12 years. However, she grew increasingly disturbed. In 1897, she directed the board of trustees, "that the students be taught that everyone born on earth has a soul germ, and that on its development depends much in life here and everything in Life Eternal." She forbade students from sketching nude models in life-drawing class, banned automobiles from campus, and did not allow a hospital to be constructed so that people wouldn't get the impression Stanford was unhealthy. She had Starr Jordan fire Edward Alsworth Ross, a close friend of his on the economics and sociology faculty, whom she suspected of being a radical for his public statements in favor of municipal control of city transit systems. Between 1899 and 1905, she spent 3 million on a grand construction scheme building lavish memorials to the Stanford family, while university faculty and self-supporting students were living in poverty.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed parts of the Main Quad (including the original iteration of Memorial Church) as well as the gate that first marked the entrance of the school; rebuilding on a somewhat less grandiose scale began immediately.
The official motto of Stanford University, selected by the Stanfords, is "Die Luft der Freiheit weht." Translated from the German, this quotation of Ulrich von Hutten means "The wind of freedom blows." At the time of the school's establishment, German had recently replaced Latin as the supraregional language of science and philosophy.
In addition, the Stanford Research Institute operated one of the four original nodes that comprised ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet
Campus
Stanford University is located on a 8,180-acre (33.1 km2)campus approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose. Stanford is situated adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, on the San Francisco Peninsula. It also operates the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, in Monterey Bay. The main campus is bounded by El Camino Real, Stanford Avenue, Junipero Serra Boulevard and Sand Hill Road, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula.
Stanford University owns 8,183 acres (33.1 km2) which makes it the largest university campus in the world, in terms of contiguous acreage. Moscow State University is built vertically and has a larger total floor area but occupies a smaller piece of land. Berry College occupies 28,000 acres (110 km²) of contiguous land, and Paul Smith's College occupies 14,200 acres (57 km2) of land in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, but neither is a university. Duke University occupies 8,709 acres (35.2 km²), but they are not contiguous. The United States Air Force Academy has a contiguous 18,000 acres (73 km²) at its disposal, but it is not a university. Dartmouth College, with a large land grant, owns more than 50,000 acres (200 km²), but only 269 of those are part of the campus
Stanford offers free passes for public transportation, offers a free shuttle bus service named Marguerite and offers monetary incentives to its employees for carpooling. The Green Dorm currently under construction will house between forty and fifty students, have a net carbon emission of zero, and produce more electricity than the building itself uses.In 2008, The Sustainable Endowments Institute awarded Stanford University with a grade of B+ in its annual College Sustainability Report Card, making Stanford one of the top twenty of the 200 colleges and universities reviewed. The Aspen Institute ranked the Stanford Graduate School of Business as the #1 MBA program for incorporating social and environmental issues into the training of future business leaders, out of 590 schools worldwide.
Academics
Stanford University is a large, highly residential research university with a majority of enrollments coming from graduate and professional students. The full-time, four year undergraduate program is classified as "most selective" and has an arts & sciences focus with high graduate student coexistence. Stanford University is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. Full-time undergraduate tuition was $36,030 for 2008-2009
Other Stanford-affiliated institutions include the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and the Stanford Research Institute, a now-independent institution which originated at the University, in addition to the Stanford Humanities Center.
Stanford also houses the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a major public policy think tank that attracts visiting scholars from around the world, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, which is dedicated to the more specific study of international relations. Apparently because it could not locate a copy in any of its libraries, the Soviet Union was obliged to ask the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University, for a microfilm copy of its original edition of the first issue of Pravda (dated March 5, 1917).
The Stanford Center, an intensive language training institute, was originally established at National Taiwan University (NTU) to fulfill Stanford's needs in training graduate students in Mandarin Chinese. Later, other prestigious universities joined the board and the institute changed its name to the Inter-University Program (IUP). Today, the IUP has relocated to Beijing, while the original program in Taipei exists as an institute of NTU and is now known as the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP)
Rankings
Stanford University's undergraduate program is ranked fourth among national universities by U.S. News and World Report (USNWR). Stanford is ranked second among world universities and second among universities in the Americas by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, nineteenth among world universities in the THES - QS World University Rankings, seventh among national universities by The Washington Monthly,second among "global universities" by Newsweek, and in the first-tier among national universities by The Center for Measuring University Performance. The Stanford Law School is ranked second in the nation while its Education School and Business School are both ranked first. Stanford School of Medicine is currently ranked eighth in research according to U.S. News and World Report. The acceptance rates for all Stanford schools (undergraduate, graduate, and professional) are amongst the lowest (if not the lowest) in the United States.
Stanford University was ranked 17th in the 2008 THES-QS World University ranking
2 comments:
Your title has a typo. Standford vs Stanford.
Thank for your correction, reader.
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